I thought as a little kid that Star Raiders was the ultimate immersive experience. The stars on the screen, the beeps, and just the sounds in general. I was transported into that universe. I can't even describe it. It shows how important expectation is.
Seeing SR for the first time I just KNEW I had to have an Atari. You have to think about the time - 1979. Space Invaders and Asteroids which were Pseudo 3D in vector graphics and here was a game with a plot, 3D rasterized graphics, and more controls than just left/right fire. There was simply NOTHING like it until Rescue on Fractalus or Elite.
Star Raiders sold the hardware to a lot of people. It inspired a whole subgenre of imitations on other platforms. I just saw someone describe it as an open-world game, which in a sense it is. I think the way it combined strategy elements with a first-person space shooter to evoke a universe with some depth to it was really compelling.
100% agree. Controlling your ship with the joystick and keyboard felt like you were truly in control of everything. As a Star Wars kid, I was hooked on this game.
My first computer as a kid was a 600XL, followed later by a 130XE I bought with paper-route money. These are all my childhood favorites! Still playing most of them today.
I really appreciate that you show enough play time for each game (with competent playing) to get a real sense of game objective and mechanics. Well done!
You all probably dont give a shit but does anybody know a way to get back into an instagram account? I was stupid lost my password. I would love any help you can give me.
Bruce Lee, Montezuma's Revenge, Karateka, Boulder Dash are some of my favourites. I like and miss the sound of programs loading. I still have my 800 and 1050 but lost 300+ disks full of good stuff during a move. Good video!
800xl + 1050 owner here too... but I've had to re-buy over the last couple of years after giving away a massive collection ~1993 to make way for Amiga and PC stuff :(
@@ContractCAD Similar to me here. I first got an Atari 400, then sold it to get an 800XL, and later a 1050 Disk drive, then a C64 and an Atari ST (then decided to sell the 8 bits when I got an Amiga) Later sold the ST and Amiga when I got a PC. I think that my reasoning was that emulators negated the need for the original hardware. I had a huge collection of disks, carts and cassettes and sold them for peanuts. I regret it, but time moves on!
I had an Atari 400 for a while back in the day ... Star Raiders was my absolute favourite game on the system, along with a fun selection of other games like Bruce Lee, Zaxxon and Shamus.
I know graphics aren't everything, but Journey to the Planets seems impressive for 1970's hardware... Until you see it next to Star Raiders and Wayout on the same system and they are doing a fully 3D space shooter and an FPS. Absolutely bonkers amounts of skill went into getting the most of those little machines.
Something I've always felt is that restriction breeds innovation. The machines had little in the way of actual processing power, but man, these programmers used every trick in the book to utilize them to the max. Today, with nearly unlimited tools at their disposal, game developers can make things look like actual reality. So real you can't tell it's a video game. Is it impressive? A little. It's just the expected evolution of things. It's easy to do that when your resources are basically unlimited. But back then? Yeah, it WAS impressive what they could accomplish.
I don't know how you and I managed to have such similar taste in Atari 8-bit games, but your list there could have been taken from my game collection in the early 80s. Thus, quite a trip down memory lane for me. Also much, much thanks for the details regarding the emulator.
I've loved Star Raiders since I was a kid, and it still stands out as an amazing game to play today. What still boggles my mind as a developer is how Doug Neubauer pulled this off in 1979 on this hardware.
Wow, I remember playing so many of these games on my Atari 800 and 800XL back then! It's fun to take a walk down memory lane, but I honestly don't miss any of it. lol
Hi I know it's been awhile since you posted this but I have to tell you that you've unlocked a ton of core memories for me as kid. My favorite game you had in there was Gateway to Apshai. That was the OG of RPG's lol. Thanks again!
Keep it up! Nice presentation and your video has a good feel. There are a lot of these kind of videos so look for those obscure games. Text adventures too! Even those stir up some teary eyed nostalgia in some. More please! I was looking for more to watch right now and saw you didn't have many. I was ready for more!
The most astonishing thing about Star Raiders: 8 kilobytes. The entire thing was created on 8,000 BYTES. It seems almost inconceivable that such feats were possible.
Stumbled upon your video and had a memory from being a young kid playing games. I remember playing a game back then, and losing the disk or something, and I couldn't remember the name, and didnt even really know how to describe it properly. I looked and asked around for what seemed like months as a kid. Watching this I think it was Gateway to Apshai, funny at such a young age I enjoyed rpg / dungeon games even though I didnt know what they were! I played tons of boulderdash with my mom back in the day. I also think there was a level editor or something in Mr Robot, spent so much time making crazy levels. Ah man and bruce lee. You could have the second player play as the opponent I think, and so my sister and I would help eachother out just killing the ninja repeatedly so bruce lee could have an easier job, or just annoying the other person making tons of "moo" noises
Not so simple. The Atari 8bit line set standards and protocols followed by the industry for years to come. It was the first home platform to introduce: -Screen Saver -USB like peripheral connection -Distinct custom circuits (ICs) for large color palette, hardware and sprites scrolling, multichannel sound etc. -Monitor SVIDEO connection
Star Raiders was one of my first three games that I ever played. I played it in 1987 and it took seven years until I was impressed by a game again... That game was X-Wing.
I know right! It's amazing, considering the rendering and smooth animation. Many years before iD software's Hovertank and Wolfenstein 3D. Wonder if John Carmack was inspired by this (and other early 3d games)
WHAT??? Why, in 30-odd years of Atari 8-bit fandom, has no one ever told me about Wayout?!! One step away from a Wolfenstein / Doom game from 1982! I'm off to find out more :)
You should check out MIDI Maze on Atari XE (same hardware as the Atari 800 only with extra RAM). A Wolfenstein clone would be possible here. There's an impressive Wolf 3D homebrew demo.
Atari 800XL, with an Indus GT floppy drive. Two of the games I played that I don't see mentioned were Buck Rogers and Ballblazer, which I didn't know was a Lucasfilm game at the time. Choplifter was a bunch of fun too. Edit: Looks like someone else remembers Ballblazer too. Mustn't forget Gauntlet.
I saved my paper round money to buy Zorro from Boots for £14.99 back in the day, waited the fifteen minutes to load and finished it in my first attempt...
Though it wasn't my first 8 but computer. Seeing Altima II on the Atari 800 was my best. I got really into basic programming. Wish it wasn't a thing to now.
I loved ths single screen platfomers of the 80s, and I never could understand the hype when that crap game called 'Mario Bros' was released, where you could only run to the right all the time. Perfected voredom in it's silly linearity instead of enjoying the freedom of arbitrary movement we where used to before. These games with a mini maze on screen, with all the switches, secrets, enemies in sight, thinking on more complex patterns just offered so much more on any relevant aspect, besides maybe the technical aspect, as they didn't feature scrolling. So I guess the reason why Mario becamse so unjustified popular is jus that in truth it was a casual game for the masses. So the true sucessors to the classic single screen platformers exclusively are 'Metroidvania' style games, like Turrican, Metroid, Castlevania and such, where you had to explore a way more interesting and compley 'real' 2D world instead of just following a hose.
90% of the titles do...then there are a few that look like they are running 3D the way a 16-bit console would. Lynx was like that in a way, it could push 3D but with a low resolution output.
"Ever wondered what the world was like before Super Mario Bros"Maybe it's because I was born in '88 - but I've never been able to get into anything pre-NES - and not for lack of trying. My life is basically dedicated to video game archival but... god help me pre-NES games just are so god awful lol
People born in 1998 likely say the same thing about the NES era you experienced. But here's what made the pre-NES early eighties interval so special; it produced the _first_ real computer games. Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari) once said that every video game after Pong was in some sense a derivative concept. I wouldn't go that far, but it's interesting that practically every gaming concept around now was already present in the market by 1985. I was born in 1969 and witnessed the whole saga of video game development from its inception. People get excited about _new_ games now, but that feeling can never compare to the revelation of the video game concept itself.
@@Daniel-Six I'm sure they do, which is why I prefaced my comment with that statement. I'm sure people born in 2008 feel the same way about the mid-90's systems as well. I can only imagine kids born in 2018, who are now turning 5 will view anything non-vr as archaic by the time they are teenagers as well. My point with the preface though was that I've certainly given it a fair shake as part of the medium's history as a whole - and it's not to say there's NOTHING I like pre-NES. Console games. I absolutely adore Asteroids from the arcades, and I used to play my dad's old Coleco Telestar Alpha on the Jai-Alai setting for absurd amounts of time. AstroSmash on Intellivision is another one I sunk stupid amounts of time into. From my perspective though, it's easy to see how the market crashed in that era. I find it exceptionally hard to find individual games that are enthralling. They are out there, but you have to dig pretty deep I feel by comparison to the licensed libraries that followed.
@@retropulse03 Thank you for the comprehensive and articulate response--a rare phenomenon on YT now. Two observations, if I may. First, the "crash" of 1983 was mostly an accounting phenomenon that never entered the zeitgeist of actual game players from that era. It was unknown to me personally until AVGN did an episode on the effort to recover all those unsold ET games from a landfill. The crash was not really an indictment of game development competence at top companies like Atari and Activision--it was more the result of maneuvers by hardened businessmen in the space like Jack Tramiel, who were rapidly popularizing home computers which could displace demand for consoles. That is more obvious in distant retrospection of the era. Second... it is not clear to me that a steadfast correlation exists between better hardware and better games. I've spent most of my adult life working in professional 3D animation, so I once took it for granted that this is true, but over the decades I've come to genuinely appreciate the role of abstraction in art. Less really is more a lot of the time. For all the hoopla about visual verisimilitude in modern games, it's the _writing_ in titles like The Last of Us that really stands out... and writing is purely abstract, situated beyond the concept of visual resolution.
@@Daniel-Six Well thanks, yeah I 'try' to at least have something to say sometimes haha. That's an interesting take, and not one I'd heard before. I actually first heard about the crash from an episode of "Modern Marvels" about video games on the History Channel way back in about 2001/2 when I was in the 8th grade haha. Funny enough that was sort of the genesis (no pun intended) on me getting deeply into video games as more than just a pass-time - so in the entirety I've been aware of it I don't think I've been able to get perspective from anyone who actually lived through it AND was interested in it at the time. The obsession with hardware for actual game quality I agree needs to die out a bit. I think Indie game devs have done some good work in dispelling that idea but I'm not sure the average consumer will ever come around on it. My wife's a 'little' bit of a gamer and enjoys games like Halo and Division and some of the new Nintendo stuff... but her disdain for pixels and low polygon counts really blocks her off from experiencing what I would call the best 20 years of gaming. (~1985-2005). Personally, while I appreciate good writing in games like the last of us, it's always games that focus on environmental storytelling that get to me. In that light, I would say that it's at least one aspect of writing that has benefited from increased graphics, but only to a point. I love when a game world just shuts up and let's me see what is going on instead of telling me lol One of the reasons I probably don't care about this concept of "lore" being a big feature these days.
![สาวเมืองเพชร - ธีเดช ทองอภิชาติ [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kEt7F9PvO3I/mqdefault.jpg)
I thought as a little kid that Star Raiders was the ultimate immersive experience. The stars on the screen, the beeps, and just the sounds in general. I was transported into that universe. I can't even describe it. It shows how important expectation is.
Seeing SR for the first time I just KNEW I had to have an Atari. You have to think about the time - 1979. Space Invaders and Asteroids which were Pseudo 3D in vector graphics and here was a game with a plot, 3D rasterized graphics, and more controls than just left/right fire. There was simply NOTHING like it until Rescue on Fractalus or Elite.
Star Raiders sold the hardware to a lot of people. It inspired a whole subgenre of imitations on other platforms. I just saw someone describe it as an open-world game, which in a sense it is. I think the way it combined strategy elements with a first-person space shooter to evoke a universe with some depth to it was really compelling.
It was an INCREDIBLE game in the day. Blew my mind and kept me entertained like no game since, frankly.
100% agree. Controlling your ship with the joystick and keyboard felt like you were truly in control of everything. As a Star Wars kid, I was hooked on this game.
The designer of the sound chip POKEY himself coded the game. See Wikipedia. Doug Neubauer
Fort Apocalypse was a favorite!
My first computer as a kid was a 600XL, followed later by a 130XE I bought with paper-route money. These are all my childhood favorites! Still playing most of them today.
I really appreciate that you show enough play time for each game (with competent playing) to get a real sense of game objective and mechanics. Well done!
You all probably dont give a shit but does anybody know a way to get back into an instagram account?
I was stupid lost my password. I would love any help you can give me.
@Isaiah Preston instablaster =)
Bruce Lee, Montezuma's Revenge, Karateka, Boulder Dash are some of my favourites. I like and miss the sound of programs loading. I still have my 800 and 1050 but lost 300+ disks full of good stuff during a move. Good video!
800xl + 1050 owner here too... but I've had to re-buy over the last couple of years after giving away a massive collection ~1993 to make way for Amiga and PC stuff :(
Great days. IK+ and Fractalus were great too.
Yeah, me and my 1050 Happy drive were busy back then
@@ContractCAD Similar to me here. I first got an Atari 400, then sold it to get an 800XL, and later a 1050 Disk drive, then a C64 and an Atari ST (then decided to sell the 8 bits when I got an Amiga) Later sold the ST and Amiga when I got a PC. I think that my reasoning was that emulators negated the need for the original hardware. I had a huge collection of disks, carts and cassettes and sold them for peanuts. I regret it, but time moves on!
Don't worry... Get a hacked psp and slap an emulator on it and all the roms... Works a treat!
Wayout is just downright eerie for an 8-bit'er in 1982. Made me get off the couch :)
I had an Atari 400 for a while back in the day ... Star Raiders was my absolute favourite game on the system, along with a fun selection of other games like Bruce Lee, Zaxxon and Shamus.
Bruce Lee was excellent on this machine, the Atari's Pokey chip was mental 😉
I know graphics aren't everything, but Journey to the Planets seems impressive for 1970's hardware... Until you see it next to Star Raiders and Wayout on the same system and they are doing a fully 3D space shooter and an FPS. Absolutely bonkers amounts of skill went into getting the most of those little machines.
Something I've always felt is that restriction breeds innovation. The machines had little in the way of actual processing power, but man, these programmers used every trick in the book to utilize them to the max. Today, with nearly unlimited tools at their disposal, game developers can make things look like actual reality. So real you can't tell it's a video game. Is it impressive? A little. It's just the expected evolution of things. It's easy to do that when your resources are basically unlimited. But back then? Yeah, it WAS impressive what they could accomplish.
THANK YOU! so many games I'd never remembered without your video!
To hear the music from journey to the planets...amazing! So many wonderful memories of a wonderful time ...
One of the reasons I liked these games, you always wanted get to the next screen. That's what brought you back.
All of these games look very cool even today. Thanks for sharing this.
I don't know how you and I managed to have such similar taste in Atari 8-bit games, but your list there could have been taken from my game collection in the early 80s. Thus, quite a trip down memory lane for me. Also much, much thanks for the details regarding the emulator.
I've loved Star Raiders since I was a kid, and it still stands out as an amazing game to play today. What still boggles my mind as a developer is how Doug Neubauer pulled this off in 1979 on this hardware.
Not only that. I think it also runs on a 400 with 4k or so. Amazing.
@@arnetrautmann9783 sure does, I still play it on mine when I get the machine out 😁
how many hours did i spend playing that game. tremendous!
Star Commander Class 1 here. It took many playing hours to get it. I'm a proud geek.
Star Raiders was an obsession of mine and my friends. Forty years later it's the only game I have for my Atari 800 emulator.
I like Jet Boot Jack on Atari the most! Boulder Dash, Hero, Pole Position, Pop Eye and Submission are also my favorite games all times. Cheers!
Wow, I remember playing so many of these games on my Atari 800 and 800XL back then! It's fun to take a walk down memory lane, but I honestly don't miss any of it. lol
Hi I know it's been awhile since you posted this but I have to tell you that you've unlocked a ton of core memories for me as kid. My favorite game you had in there was Gateway to Apshai. That was the OG of RPG's lol. Thanks again!
Keep it up! Nice presentation and your video has a good feel. There are a lot of these kind of videos so look for those obscure games. Text adventures too! Even those stir up some teary eyed nostalgia in some. More please! I was looking for more to watch right now and saw you didn't have many. I was ready for more!
Lots of good stuff here, but Star Raiders is THE killer app for the 8-bits... amazing stuff for 1979.
The most astonishing thing about Star Raiders: 8 kilobytes. The entire thing was created on 8,000 BYTES. It seems almost inconceivable that such feats were possible.
Stumbled upon your video and had a memory from being a young kid playing games. I remember playing a game back then, and losing the disk or something, and I couldn't remember the name, and didnt even really know how to describe it properly. I looked and asked around for what seemed like months as a kid. Watching this I think it was Gateway to Apshai, funny at such a young age I enjoyed rpg / dungeon games even though I didnt know what they were!
I played tons of boulderdash with my mom back in the day. I also think there was a level editor or something in Mr Robot, spent so much time making crazy levels.
Ah man and bruce lee. You could have the second player play as the opponent I think, and so my sister and I would help eachother out just killing the ninja repeatedly so bruce lee could have an easier job, or just annoying the other person making tons of "moo" noises
Really impressive how they managed to achieve fun games with so simple technology sometimes.
Not so simple. The Atari 8bit line set standards and protocols followed by the industry for years to come.
It was the first home platform to introduce:
-Screen Saver
-USB like peripheral connection
-Distinct custom circuits (ICs) for large color palette, hardware and sprites scrolling, multichannel sound etc.
-Monitor SVIDEO connection
Still got my 800 from 1982, accessories, and games, in mint condition.
Amazing, thank you for making this.
I recently acquired an Atari 800 and was wondering what games to get for it.
Star Raiders was one of my first three games that I ever played. I played it in 1987 and it took seven years until I was impressed by a game again... That game was X-Wing.
When I was little ghost chaser was my game! I would love to play that again
Wayout in '82 must have been like VR compared to what else was available on home computers and consoles.
I know right! It's amazing, considering the rendering and smooth animation. Many years before iD software's Hovertank and Wolfenstein 3D. Wonder if John Carmack was inspired by this (and other early 3d games)
WHAT??? Why, in 30-odd years of Atari 8-bit fandom, has no one ever told me about Wayout?!! One step away from a Wolfenstein / Doom game from 1982!
I'm off to find out more :)
if you liked that, look up it's sequel "capture the flag"
Never owned an Atari (anything) and that puzzled me to bits also! Looked amazing!
You should check out MIDI Maze on Atari XE (same hardware as the Atari 800 only with extra RAM). A Wolfenstein clone would be possible here. There's an impressive Wolf 3D homebrew demo.
This is the kind of secret game like Jeff Minters Hi Res Space Invaders on the ZX81 which for 30 years seems to have been a secret too.
So many great memories here….my first computer was the 800xl, and I played most of these games. ❤
Muy útiles las descripciones al principio de cada juego!
Se agradece la información de calidad!
Star raider is my childhood memories
Gateway to Apshai!!! This is a geat video!
It is crazy how many game concepts were pioneered back then. I had an 800XL and played some the games on this list, great times.
The smooth scrolling was a surprise to me.
Lol that's what I came looking for. Lol. As I was reading, I all the sudden hear a familiar warp.
Wow man excellent
Fantastic!!! This Atari 800 stuff looks great@!!
Subbed and liked to support another great Retro Channel👍
thanks for the nice nostalgia.
star raiders was my fav, never played a game like it since. i got so good that i could destroy the enemy with shields down.
Atari 800XL, with an Indus GT floppy drive. Two of the games I played that I don't see mentioned were Buck Rogers and Ballblazer, which I didn't know was a Lucasfilm game at the time. Choplifter was a bunch of fun too.
Edit: Looks like someone else remembers Ballblazer too. Mustn't forget Gauntlet.
Giving my 80's Flash Backs..I love Bolder Dash, and Bruce lee....l.
Nice, early games for Atari
Geile Mukke Alter!
This was my first game console😂 great to remind some of those games
I still have my 800 somewhere . And I should have a trackball also . Works great for Centipede .
I loved Journey to the Planets
This is great stuff.
I remember a lot of those games. Played a lot of them either on Atari or C64. I understand people bought Atari 800s just for Star Raiders.
I saved my paper round money to buy Zorro from Boots for £14.99 back in the day, waited the fifteen minutes to load and finished it in my first attempt...
very good games nostalgia
i still have our atari 800XL with the 800s cassette tape drive and a few games but cant remember how to boot them. :)
Though it wasn't my first 8 but computer. Seeing Altima
II on the Atari 800 was my best. I got really into basic programming. Wish it wasn't a thing to now.
Fort apacolypse damn
Nice, if possible SPY HUNTER Game :)
Interesting video. Would be interesting to see if anyone could hack Wayout to see it it could have done a Wolfenstein kind of game back then.
Fort apocalypse all the way!
What a great system for the time it was released.
These look better than the 2600
Goonies!!! i love this game )
few of them looked pretty advanced for its time.
8:50 well so... is Paul Edelstein the father of the 3D games like Doom or Wolfenstein coming a decade later ?
Oh man miner 49er. I believe it gets faster and faster as u turn the score over. I did at least a 1000 times. Lol
Wayout had one level i never could escape. Any help?
Love to shut up pro C-64 fans when they say the 64 is better than the ATARI 800 . All I have to do is say two words : STAR RAIDERS .
Es obra de una mente privilegiada
As a comment, it seems the Atari computer, was at the top.
Would Atari have bested Commodore if the 1400XL had been released instead of the 1200XL?
No Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Pac Man, Dig Dug or any of the other games that were made for this AND the Atari 5200 huh?
How could you leave out Frogger?
wayout is wayimpressive
🤘😁🤘
i have a completed rom list of all the atari computer systems
10,000th view! Woo!
These games really need to be viewed on a CRT. On TFTs they look like blocky garbage.
rapidus runs zx spectrum software
I loved ths single screen platfomers of the 80s, and I never could understand the hype when that crap game called 'Mario Bros' was released, where you could only run to the right all the time. Perfected voredom in it's silly linearity instead of enjoying the freedom of arbitrary movement we where used to before. These games with a mini maze on screen, with all the switches, secrets, enemies in sight, thinking on more complex patterns just offered so much more on any relevant aspect, besides maybe the technical aspect, as they didn't feature scrolling. So I guess the reason why Mario becamse so unjustified popular is jus that in truth it was a casual game for the masses. So the true sucessors to the classic single screen platformers exclusively are 'Metroidvania' style games, like Turrican, Metroid, Castlevania and such, where you had to explore a way more interesting and compley 'real' 2D world instead of just following a hose.
Looks in between the quality of an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision
90% of the titles do...then there are a few that look like they are running 3D the way a 16-bit console would. Lynx was like that in a way, it could push 3D but with a low resolution output.
Yep, that was 1979 for you.
Dh2d
Sadly not every game is at the level of Star Raiders.
The miner 49er cheat code is a phone number in the U.S possibly the phone number of the publisher 🤔
I went frim 400 to 1200 so didnt have 800.
5200+
Yes C64 was the good choice
"Ever wondered what the world was like before Super Mario Bros"Maybe it's because I was born in '88 - but I've never been able to get into anything pre-NES - and not for lack of trying. My life is basically dedicated to video game archival but... god help me pre-NES games just are so god awful lol
They really aren't, too bad I can't show you and prove it 😜
People born in 1998 likely say the same thing about the NES era you experienced.
But here's what made the pre-NES early eighties interval so special; it produced the _first_ real computer games. Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari) once said that every video game after Pong was in some sense a derivative concept. I wouldn't go that far, but it's interesting that practically every gaming concept around now was already present in the market by 1985.
I was born in 1969 and witnessed the whole saga of video game development from its inception. People get excited about _new_ games now, but that feeling can never compare to the revelation of the video game concept itself.
@@Daniel-Six I'm sure they do, which is why I prefaced my comment with that statement. I'm sure people born in 2008 feel the same way about the mid-90's systems as well. I can only imagine kids born in 2018, who are now turning 5 will view anything non-vr as archaic by the time they are teenagers as well.
My point with the preface though was that I've certainly given it a fair shake as part of the medium's history as a whole - and it's not to say there's NOTHING I like pre-NES. Console games. I absolutely adore Asteroids from the arcades, and I used to play my dad's old Coleco Telestar Alpha on the Jai-Alai setting for absurd amounts of time. AstroSmash on Intellivision is another one I sunk stupid amounts of time into.
From my perspective though, it's easy to see how the market crashed in that era. I find it exceptionally hard to find individual games that are enthralling. They are out there, but you have to dig pretty deep I feel by comparison to the licensed libraries that followed.
@@retropulse03 Thank you for the comprehensive and articulate response--a rare phenomenon on YT now.
Two observations, if I may.
First, the "crash" of 1983 was mostly an accounting phenomenon that never entered the zeitgeist of actual game players from that era. It was unknown to me personally until AVGN did an episode on the effort to recover all those unsold ET games from a landfill. The crash was not really an indictment of game development competence at top companies like Atari and Activision--it was more the result of maneuvers by hardened businessmen in the space like Jack Tramiel, who were rapidly popularizing home computers which could displace demand for consoles. That is more obvious in distant retrospection of the era.
Second... it is not clear to me that a steadfast correlation exists between better hardware and better games. I've spent most of my adult life working in professional 3D animation, so I once took it for granted that this is true, but over the decades I've come to genuinely appreciate the role of abstraction in art. Less really is more a lot of the time. For all the hoopla about visual verisimilitude in modern games, it's the _writing_ in titles like The Last of Us that really stands out... and writing is purely abstract, situated beyond the concept of visual resolution.
@@Daniel-Six Well thanks, yeah I 'try' to at least have something to say sometimes haha.
That's an interesting take, and not one I'd heard before. I actually first heard about the crash from an episode of "Modern Marvels" about video games on the History Channel way back in about 2001/2 when I was in the 8th grade haha. Funny enough that was sort of the genesis (no pun intended) on me getting deeply into video games as more than just a pass-time - so in the entirety I've been aware of it I don't think I've been able to get perspective from anyone who actually lived through it AND was interested in it at the time.
The obsession with hardware for actual game quality I agree needs to die out a bit. I think Indie game devs have done some good work in dispelling that idea but I'm not sure the average consumer will ever come around on it. My wife's a 'little' bit of a gamer and enjoys games like Halo and Division and some of the new Nintendo stuff... but her disdain for pixels and low polygon counts really blocks her off from experiencing what I would call the best 20 years of gaming. (~1985-2005).
Personally, while I appreciate good writing in games like the last of us, it's always games that focus on environmental storytelling that get to me. In that light, I would say that it's at least one aspect of writing that has benefited from increased graphics, but only to a point. I love when a game world just shuts up and let's me see what is going on instead of telling me lol One of the reasons I probably don't care about this concept of "lore" being a big feature these days.
wow the graphics suck
This is really garbage compared to the C64 at the time.
C64 came out after
I had the atari 400 i could,nt afford the 800 it was great but looking back now the games were rubbish
If you couldn't master them, just say that lol