Tramiel's talking about Atari

Sam Tramiel talks about atari and the jaguar 64
Sorry for the poor quality.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Atari
• Jaguar
• Tramiel

[snake2006]

@lightdark28

3DO was a sound concept, problem is that Trip Hawkins had no idea how to sell consoles. He set it up so they made money off the games, and licensed out the hardware and the hardware manufactures had to make money on the hardware. Instead of selling the machine at a loss to make it up with software. The razor and blade model.

[snake2006]

@JayArgonaut

Along with having incomplete chip sets in the Jaguar full of bugs didn't help the Jag at all.

Atari didn't create the ST from scratch though, Jack took Commodore employees with him when he left Commodore and they were already working on the next machine to succeed the C64, he just took those guys to Atari.

[snake2006]

@ViciousAlienKlown

The SNES did outsell the Genesis. Genesis bowed out early in 1995. It took Nintendo till late 1994 to fully catch up and pull ahead of Sega, all thanks to 2 games. Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country.

[JayArgonaut]

@Kevo00 The Falcon could've succeeded and made a niche for itself within the music world. The specs and price made it a dream machine for musicians. With the right marketing it would've triumphed but once again Atari dropped the ball. I never ever saw one advert on UK TV or in the press for the Falcon. They even used the old ST case just to save money.

The Tramiel's wasn't short of cash but were cheapskates who didn't want to spend it on basic essentials like good advertising and promotion.

[Kevo00]

Dear old Sam. Atari never really had a chance by this stage with the likes of Sony's deep pockets entering the industry. He'd already messed up by putting lots of money into the Falcon which ultimately had little chance of success against the might of the DOS/Windows and Mac platforms, which were becoming affordable as home computers by then.

[azmanntoz]

why is this pixelated? Is this an example of what the jaguar could do with video? lol

[ViciousAlienKlown]

@Murmurdamadman The SNES didn't out sell the Genesis, it was more like a 50/50 take on the market .

[freezafan]

Say what you will about Jack's business style; Atari was probably the most stable it ever was as a company under his leadership. Of course that changed when he passed the torch to Sam, but c'est la vie.

[Watcher3223]

All the Tramiels had for Atari was its past and they tried to market it rather than use history as a lesson for the future.

"Atari was the pioneer of the industry."

The key word here is "was." They WERE the pioneers, but they lost it the day Atari lost its lawsuit against Activision.

Instead of finding ways to work with 3rd party software companies, Atari tried to keep a monopoly on software and it blew up in their faces.

Nintendo learned this lesson well.

[Watcher3223]

As for the Tramiel's failure with Atari, I probably attribute that to a lack of long term vision and experience.

To me, it seemed as if Atari's sole purpose under the Tramiels was to get back at Commodore. Once that stopped being relevant, they had no ability to formulate a new plan to be competitive.

Another part of it was that home video games was an area the Tramiels had no experience or even interest in. When Atari became irrelevant in computers, that was the beginning of the end.