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In today’s global game market, North America is the largest and most influential regional market. Most of the 3A games in the game industry today have a very distinct American cultural imprint, and the European and American game style is also the mainstream aesthetic of the current game industry. Even most domestic players are more aware of the game culture led by North American game companies. .
Of course, this is not the first time that the American game industry has led the world. As the birthplace of electronic games, North American games used to be the core of the world's game industry, but they completely collapsed in just one year. , was not reactivated until Nintendo came to North America.
Nowadays, when talking about the painful lessons of this North American market, we more often call it the "Atari Collapse", and the "culprit" that caused this collapse is often considered to be Atari Game Company, not only did they destroy the American console game market in a short period of time, they also quickly fell from their peak and quickly disappeared from the public eye.
So, how did Atari, whose asset valuation once reached US$20 billion, collapse so quickly within a year?
In 1972, the world's first commercial home game console, the Milover Odyssey, came out. Although the price of US$100 was not cheap at the time, this novel gadget still achieved good sales. , successfully sold more than 100,000 units. This also allowed Nolan Bushnell to see the business opportunities brought by video games. In the same year, he co-founded Atari with another friend named Teddy Dabney.
In fact, the name of the Atari company, Atari, also has its own origin. Atari is actually the Roman pronunciation of the Japanese word "chit", and "chit" is also a common term in Go, which refers to the opponent's move through moves. A move in which the chess piece is forced to the point where there is only one breath left.
For Nolan, perhaps he also wants to use the name "Called Chi" to make his company become a super oligarch in the gaming industry.
The first electronic game launched by Atari was the famous "Pong".
In previous articles, we have also mentioned the huge impact of "Pong" in that era. After "Pong" became popular, almost all game companies produced games with "Pong" gameplay. Very similar game.
However, few people may know that the gameplay of "Pong" is not Atari's first. There has already been a tennis game on the Milova Odyssey console mentioned at the beginning of the article. Alan Alcorn, the producer of "Pong" himself admitted that the idea of ??"Pong" originated from this seemingly primitive tennis game.
In September 1972, after a short period of research and development, the world's first arcade machine running "Pong" was born. Unlike later arcades, arcades at that time had not yet formed a large scale. Atari also placed its first work in a bar for customers to try out to observe the market performance of "Pong".
In the end, the popularity of "Pong" exceeded Atari's expectations. Even many customers who had never visited this bar came to the bar to try out "Pong". This also made Atari Dali saw a huge business opportunity.
To this end, Nolan specifically found two other game companies to cooperate. Although they were willing to help Atari publish the arcade machine of "Pong", they refused to provide Atari with the funds needed to produce the arcade machine. Well, the cash-strapped Atari had to borrow money from banks to obtain funds.
I believe players who are familiar with game history know the following story. "Pong" completely detonated the craze of video games after it was launched. In 1973 alone, Atari received more than 2,500 copies of "Pong" orders, and in 1974 the number of orders rose to 8,000.
Unfortunately, when "Pong" was first released, Atari did not apply for any patent for "Pong", which also led to the prevalence of imitators on the market, from the United States to Japan across the ocean. Almost all game companies are producing reskin games of "Pong". Although Atari later added patent protection to "Pong", it failed to recover its losses.
According to statistics, the original "Pong" game produced by Atari only accounts for less than 30% of the market. However, this did not stop Atari from moving forward. They are already the leader in the North American electronic game industry.
In 1976, Nolan sold Atari to Warner Communications for $26 million, and he entered the catering industry and created the famous nationwide restaurant chain brand Chuck Mouse (Chuck Mouse). cheese).
After Warner Communications acquired Atari, it invested an additional US$100 million in Atari. With sufficient financial support, Atari began to develop game consoles and launched its first game console in 1977. A home game console, the famous Atari 2600.
The Atari 2600 absorbed many of the advantages of previous home games, and launched 9 first-release escort games when the console was released. The lineup was quite luxurious at the time.
Among them, the most eye-catching one is undoubtedly "Breakout", which was transplanted from Atari's own arcade machine. This game was the earliest brick-breaking game. It was not unpopular at the time, and it will be popular in the future. Brick-breaking games are also developed and produced on the basis of "Breakout".
The success of Atari 2600 made Atari and its parent company Warner Communications so rich that after Japan Taito Company released the STG originator game "Space Invaders" in 1978, In order to avoid market competition, Atari directly bought the copyright of this game and produced the "Space Invaders" game arcade for distribution in North America.
By 1979, Atari 2600 had become the most popular Christmas gift for American users. At this time, Atari was no longer even satisfied with the gaming industry.
They developed the Atari 400 and 800 computers. Although these two models did not have any impact on their main target rival Apple, the system principles provided the basis for today's USB system. Huge inspiration.
In 1981, Atari's annual turnover reached US$1 billion, and in 1982, Atari's market value even reached an eye-popping US$20 billion. After becoming the world's leading gaming giant, all Atari seems to have to do is sit back and make money.
But it turns out that even the business empire that dominates North America may collapse overnight. In the year 1982, Atari made three major decisions, each of which They all later caused immeasurable harm to them.
The first decision Atari made was to port the popular arcade game "Pac-Man" produced and published by Namco to the Atari 2600 console. Since "Pac-Man" is very popular on arcade platforms, and Atari has considerable experience in porting arcade games before, they naturally believe that this game can be a hit.
As a result, when the total sales of Atari 2600 consoles were only 10 million units, Atari actually produced 12 million sets of "Pac-Man" cassettes, and the number of cassettes was more than the number of consoles. It was still high, which is enough to show how arrogant the top management of Atari Company was at that time.
In their view, after a game like "Pac-Man" is released, everyone will have one. As for the extra 2 million cartridges, it will drive the Atari 2600 to sell another 2 million tower.
After the release of "Pac-Man", it did sell 7 million sets thanks to the influence of the arcade version. However, due to its low porting level, the subsequent 5 million sets of cassettes eventually fell into slow sales, and Players who had purchased the cartridges were also tortured by game bugs, and many began to demand refunds from Atari.
The second major decision Atari made was to release their new console, the Atari 5200, this year. However, major quality problems were detected before the new console was released. Even after redesign, the Atari 5200's game joystick still failed to automatically reset after leaving the center position. Such quality naturally failed to convince consumers.
As for the third major decision, it was the "E.T. Alien" cartridge that we mentioned before. The quality of this game, which only took 5 weeks to make, was extremely poor.
Although Atari was well aware of the quality of its games, they still produced a full 5 million sets of cartridges. This behavior of deceiving customers as fools ultimately caused Atari to suffer consequences: "E.T." only sold 1.5 million units, and coupled with the large hoarding of "Pac-Man", only the unsaleable cartridges of these two games It reached nearly 7 million units.
In addition to the cost problems caused by the slow sales of cassettes, Atari's overturn also greatly affected the market performance of its parent company Warner Communications. As a result, Warner Communications' stock price plummeted by one-third, and its profits It also dropped by as much as 56.
But Atari also felt helpless. They knew that players could no longer pay for these inferior games. In desperation, Atari made a decision that surprised everyone. : Destroying millions of unsaleable cartridges, including "E.T." and "Pac-Man," in landfills.
Such a move naturally aroused strong concern in American society. It was reported that "25,000 children swarmed" near the landfill and "rescued" a large number of game cartridges from the waste pile.
As negative news continues to increase, Atari decided to use concrete mixing to seal these discarded cassettes in hard cement, hoping to completely cut off all speculations from the outside world. However, this kind of deception has only aroused dissatisfaction from the outside world. For many players, it is obviously unacceptable that the games they spent a lot of money to buy are not only of poor quality, but also end up being landfilled and crushed like garbage.
Of course, the U.S. console market back then was not limited to the two inferior cartridges of "E.T." and "Pac-Man". The game industry at that time was like a gold rush, and everyone wanted to To get involved, even Quaker Oats released as many as 14 inferior games during this period.
The most popular American players, who have suffered from inferior games, are intolerable. They have begun to give up electronic games, no longer believe in game consoles, and instead choose personal computers with more functionality.
Game companies that lost sales also ended up going bankrupt. The size of the North American game market also shrank rapidly thereafter, shrinking from US$3.2 billion in 1983 to US$100 million in 1985. Until Nintendo After entering the U.S. market in 1987, the North American game industry began to slowly recover.
Nintendo also learned from Atari's failure experience and formulated the famous "royalty" system to urge game manufacturers to produce high-level games by charging them high development fees.
As for Atari, which once had a market value of 20 billion? After suffering heavy losses, Warner Communications decisively sold it to Trame Technology Co., Ltd. in 1984. After experiencing a large number of layoffs, Atari has long lost its former glory, although it has since made repeated moves in the fields of personal computers and game consoles. After several years of dancing, he has never been able to regain his former glory.
Although Atari is still running today, I am afraid that it will only be remembered by players again when this infamous "black history" is mentioned.