Top 10 Atari FAILS
Top 10 Epic Atari Fails
It’s one of the oldest video game companies out there, but not everything gets better with age. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the Top 10 Epic Atari Fails. For this list, we’ll be looking at an assortment of mistakes and foul-ups Atari has made over its extensive lifespan.
#10: Atari VCS
In the mid to late-2010s, Nintendo found great success with the mini NES and SNES, prompting other companies like Sony and SEGA to follow suit. The oddest of the bunch, however, was Atari, which sought to distinguish itself from the pack with the Atari VCS. The system is admittedly intriguing; it borrows from the Atari 2600 aesthetic, but, unlike the aforementioned retro consoles, actually runs modern games. Unfortunately, since the reveal, the console has faced a troubled development. In addition to several delays, the console’s lead engineer left the project over payment issues. As of November 2019, Atari has said they’re in their final stages of pre-production and should start shipping to Indiegogo backers in March 2020 before sending units to retail.
#9: “RollerCoaster Tycoon” series
The concept of “Roller Coaster Tycoon” is one with timeless appeal. What kid wouldn’t want to build their own crazy theme park...or create rides to send visitors plummeting to their death? Well, Atari has tried bringing back the series, but clearly, the company doesn’t understand what initially made the IP so appealing. So far, it’s shelled out a mobile game that was monetized to hell, ports of the classic games, and a “Candy Crush” rip-off that just screams “tone-deaf”. Atari seems absolutely determined to bring the franchise back, but efforts thus far have left fans feeling that Atari is only interested in cleaning out their wallets.
#8: Rebooting “Haunted House”
Apart from “Roller Coaster Tycoon” and another entry on this list, Atari doesn’t really have a lot of valuable IPs under its belt. 1982’s “Haunted House” however, holds a special in the hearts of gamers as one of the earliest survival horror games. Sadly, Atari tarnished that legacy with 2014’s “Haunted House: Cryptic Graves”, a sequel that tormented players not in frights, but with dreadful voice acting, bugged achievements, and graphics that gave off the impression that it wasn’t even finished. “Haunted House” may have been a solid title back in 1982, but it feels like the only reason Atari tried reviving it was to capitalize on the return of survival horror.
#7: Rebooting “Asteroids”
“Haunted House” is not the only artifact from Atari’s heyday to have undergone a half-assed reboot. Atari similarly attempted to revive “Asteroids” in 2015 with “Asteroids: Outpost”. This new approach would turn the franchise from top-down shooter to first-person shooter with open world elements. The announcement of its early access release left journalists tired and fans uninterested. It also didn’t help that the build was practically unplayable or that the mash-up genres made the game objectives rather confusing. To no one’s surprise it wasn’t long before the game was delisted.
#6: Rebooting “Alone in the Dark” Twice
Of all the times Atari tried reviving a revered IP, this was the absolute biggest screw-up. In 2008, Atari attempted to bring back “Alone in the Dark”, a horror franchise from the ‘90s that has been praised for its unique artstyle and for helping evolve the horror genre. Unfortunately, the 2008 reboot went and tarnished its reputation with laughably bad writing and a plethora of technical issues. Atari attempted damage control… in the form of suing various European gaming websites, claiming they based their reviews off of unfinished, illegally obtained builds. Unsurprisingly, this response earned them little love from the community. The company would try to bring the franchise back in 2015 with “Alone in the Dark: Illumination”, but that arguably was even worse.
#5: Atari Lynx & Jaguar
Throughout the late-80s to mid-90s, the world watched as Atari’s hardware credibility burst into flames with the failures of its last two consoles. In September 1989, Atari tried to compete with Nintendo’s Game Boy by releasing the Atari Lynx, a handheld unit that saw healthy critical reception, but quickly died due to a lackluster marketing budget. Lynx only lasted until 1995 while Atari poured all of their resources into what would be their final console at the time - the Atari Jaguar. Needless to say, the system bombed. Reviewers pointed out design flaws like the weird controller and frequently compared its graphics to the SNES. Jaguar would last from 1993 to 1996 before Atari finally called it quits and left the console market.
#4: Toxic Work Environments
Atari found themselves in some real hot water back in early 2018. After it was announced that co-founder Nolan Bushnell was to receive the Pioneer award from the Game Developers Conference, Kotaku writer Cecilia D’Anastasio released an article where she interviewed several women who worked for Atari in the ‘70s. Their stories revealed a toxic work environment with one story revealing that female employees were invited to meetings in a hot tub. This would cause Bushnell to lose the Pioneer award, and it sparked a discussion on how much of an impact Atari may have had on how gaming companies behave behind closed doors. Bushnell, for his part, agreed with his removal and apologized for past behavior.
#3: “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982)
We were really close to putting the Atari 2600 port of “Pac-Man” on this list, but one cannot ignore the catastrophic game that was “E.T.”. Unfair, punishing, technically unstable - “E.T.” checks boxes for many of the worst descriptors a video game can earn. What made the whole thing worse was that this was being advertised as the perfect Christmas gift to kids. Instead, the game was returned to stores enmasse, and all unsold copies were taken to be buried in a desert in New Mexico. Over seven hundred thousand copies of various Atari games, including “E.T.” were hidden away from the world, thirteen hundred of which were uncovered during a 2014 excavation.
#2: Turning Down Nintendo AND Sega
Believe it or not, there was a time where the gaming industry could have taken a drastically different turn. While the industry struggled to cope with an economic disaster, Nintendo approached Atari in early 1983 to see if the gaming giant could distribute the Famicom console to US markets. However, then-CEO Ray Kassar pulled out after seeing “Donkey Kong” running on a rival console at the Consumer Electronics Show. Kassar believed Nintendo had breached their exclusivity deal, but that was not the case and not long later, Kassar was forced to resign from his position. The rest is history with Nintendo, but Atari missed another opportunity in the late ‘80s to distribute SEGA’s Genesis (aka “Mega Drive”).
#1: Video Game Crash of 1983
The crash of 1983 is often associated with “E.T.”, but the game only popped the bubble - it wasn’t the definitive cause. Atari was one of many video game companies that continuously pumped out titles while ignoring the quality, increasing their output year after year. After “E.T.” launched, the industry went into a massive recession and caused several companies to shut down. Even Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi blamed Atari for the crash in 1986, claiming they had hurt the industry when their third-party approach left it "swamped with rubbish games." This forced companies like Nintendo to enforce strict quality control and rebuilding consumer trust in video games by placing “Seal of Quality” stickers on their games.