Hi, Guest
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Now let sell them on ebay
http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/26/5656282/atari-et-landfill-new-mexico-found-cartridgesYou couldn't leave this buried. You just couldn't do it. Now we're all doomed.
Someone write a creepypasta about that. Someone buys one of these unearthed ET cartridges and then ET comes and kill him in his sleep or haunts his house or something.
WE ARE DOOMEDDD
Can someone please explain this E.T. Or Atari curse to me please?
Let me see if I can explain this a bit more comprehensively.There is no "curse". There has never been a curse. Almost no one believes in one. It's a joke. It's a joke because similar legends have arisen from people unearthing graves and getting cursed, perhaps most famously King Tuts tomb or Ootsi the iceman.To understand this, it's going to take a bit of time traveling. Way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were two main ways to play video games: the arcades, or the Atari 2600, the only major home console in America. Okay, so there were systems like the Magnavox Odyssey, but they weren't as popular. Oh, and computers. But no one had a computer then either -- PC gaming wasn't really a thing until Myst and Doom, both of which were influential for Microsoft, but that's another story.In 1977, there was a major industry crash which I won't get into, but one of the things that revived the home console market was the Atari 2600. It was incredibly popular for its day, largely due to having ports of popular arcade titles like Pac-Man. Modern gaming wasn't started by the 2600 -- that's really the NES's role -- but it was a part of the evolution.In 1983, there was a second market crash, mainly due to Atari. Contrary to popular belief, the E.T. game did not cause the crash itself, but it was indeed a symptom of a disease. The issues with Atari and its system are multifaceted. To list:Spoiler for Why the game market crashed: Too many consoles. There were a lot of consoles at this point on the market, each with their own games. It's not like today where almost everything released on a PlayStation gets an Xbox version -- it was like the Sega and Nintendo exclusives, but with like, four or five home consoles. Atari was just the biggest, but even they had two consoles when the crash occurred.Lack of financing. All of the up and coming game companies were small and lacked a lot of funds to even make games and systems.Poor quality. Many ports in particular were hastily made and were worse than the arcade versions of games in terms of bugginess. Pac-Man suffered from this for the Atari 2600. Wonder why most arcade versions of Pac-Man are actually Ms. Pac-Man? The game suffered from a lot of problems and Ms. Pac-Man fixed them. The 2600 port made them worse.Poor treatment of workers/publishers. Atari did not credit game designers, let alone give them royalties like we do today. This led to protests from developers and some turned into their own companies, like Activison today.Shareholder issues. Atari's shareholders expected way too much and the stock crashed when they were disappointed. This actually caused one of the biggest shocks to the system.Producing too many copies of a game that wouldn't sell. E.T. was guilty of this, but so was Pac-Man's ports. They were rushed for Christmas 1982 and way too many copies didn't sell. Atari expected these games to be what would sell the system and become the killer app for the system. It didn't work. Retailers sent the games back to Atari. Exactly what happened wasn't known for sure until now, but Atari did bury a lot of stuff in a Nex Mexico landfill.I'm missing a few issues, but those are the main ones. Essentially, it was a build up of too many negative factors. E.T. was a major issue, but it was only part of it. A bigger issue was shareholders expecting profits from that game and Pac-Man was just as major a contributer. It's just that we associate Pac-Man with much more than this, so we ignore it.By the way, I wasn't joking about a video game console crash itself, though. I think it will happen this generation, judging by console sales for it. We're clearly overdue for a crash time-wise and I think the current game market will collapse under its own weight given a bit more time.
We need a crash too. Hopefully we come out the other side of it this time and leave behind all the nonsense we had to deal with in the 7th and now the 8th generation: DLC, microtransactions, excessive and completely ineffective DRM tactics, every dev company trying to make Call of Duty clones, fanboy wars etc etc.Before you can rebuild you must first tear down.