This is Atari we're talking about. It hasn't been Nolan Bushnell's company since the 70s. The name has been bought up half a dozen times by this point.
This is Atari we're talking about. It hasn't been Nolan Bushnell's company since the 70s. The name has been bought up half a dozen times by this point.
No, I think they got it back, or at least they had one indy game hit that they're hoping they can follow up. Atari has been in bankruptcy court more times than Radio Shack and it's true they...
No, I think they got it back, or at least they had one indy game hit that they're hoping they can follow up.
Atari has been in bankruptcy court more times than Radio Shack and it's true they failed to live up to their own legend as early as the early 1980s when they failed to really follow up the Atari 2600 and the coin op hits like Missile Command, Asteroids, Star Wars, Tempest and such. (Somehow Roadblasters, Vindicators, and 720 were all technically quite good but nowhere near legendary.) This is nothing like Nintendo which is still making Mario and Zelda games that are greatly anticipated today.
Pong was so simple it didn't even have a microprocessor, just a set of counters and comparators that lit up a pixel when the electron beam passed over the balls and the paddles. The real sequels were Breakout (an actual 1-p game) and Taito's Arkanoid.
Qomp though not only appeals to nostalgia (though even I barely remember Pong, and it's not like Fleetwood Mac which has been playing on the radio ever since) but it does tap the intersection of the very simple aesthetic of Pong and the kind of tricks we can play easily with programmable shaders today so I think Qomp 2 might make it big, Atari deserves it.
Pong came out only about a year or so after Intel made their 4004 processor (considered to be one of, if not the first microprocessors on the market), which was sold for roughly the equivalent of...
Pong came out only about a year or so after Intel made their 4004 processor (considered to be one of, if not the first microprocessors on the market), which was sold for roughly the equivalent of $450 in today's dollars. It would have been very expensive if it had one of those! Besides that, making games out of discrete hardware was their real claim to fame in their early days, as demonstrated by Computer Space, which would have otherwise run on a minicomputer that could have cost over a million of today's dollars.
IIRC Atari wouldn't use microprocessors in their systems until the end of the 70s.
From what it looks like Qomp was a really tiny indy game, now that that has been a commercial and critical success it seems that Atari is going to expand it in a big way and try to make the most...
From what it looks like Qomp was a really tiny indy game, now that that has been a commercial and critical success it seems that Atari is going to expand it in a big way and try to make the most of the brand.
Early this summer I went down to Binghamton, NY where there are two fairly serious retro game shops and it looks to me that there is serious interest in early 1980s game consoles including the Atari 2600, specifically I see a lot of the cartridges for sale as well as old consoles and also new consoles that are compatible with the old 2600. With that context I can see Atari would want to make the most they can out of the brand as challenging as it could be to turn Pong into a single-player game with substantial game play.
Just by taking in the title and not reading the article... They've run out of imagination, right?
This is Atari we're talking about. It hasn't been Nolan Bushnell's company since the 70s. The name has been bought up half a dozen times by this point.
No, I think they got it back, or at least they had one indy game hit that they're hoping they can follow up.
Atari has been in bankruptcy court more times than Radio Shack and it's true they failed to live up to their own legend as early as the early 1980s when they failed to really follow up the Atari 2600 and the coin op hits like Missile Command, Asteroids, Star Wars, Tempest and such. (Somehow Roadblasters, Vindicators, and 720 were all technically quite good but nowhere near legendary.) This is nothing like Nintendo which is still making Mario and Zelda games that are greatly anticipated today.
Pong was so simple it didn't even have a microprocessor, just a set of counters and comparators that lit up a pixel when the electron beam passed over the balls and the paddles. The real sequels were Breakout (an actual 1-p game) and Taito's Arkanoid.
Qomp though not only appeals to nostalgia (though even I barely remember Pong, and it's not like Fleetwood Mac which has been playing on the radio ever since) but it does tap the intersection of the very simple aesthetic of Pong and the kind of tricks we can play easily with programmable shaders today so I think Qomp 2 might make it big, Atari deserves it.
Pong came out only about a year or so after Intel made their 4004 processor (considered to be one of, if not the first microprocessors on the market), which was sold for roughly the equivalent of $450 in today's dollars. It would have been very expensive if it had one of those! Besides that, making games out of discrete hardware was their real claim to fame in their early days, as demonstrated by Computer Space, which would have otherwise run on a minicomputer that could have cost over a million of today's dollars.
IIRC Atari wouldn't use microprocessors in their systems until the end of the 70s.
Exactly, the 6502 was so cheap it singehandedly sparked the microcomputer revolution.
So it's a sequel to Pong but really a sequel to Qomp? How will that work, exactly? And why not just rename it to Pong 2?
From what it looks like Qomp was a really tiny indy game, now that that has been a commercial and critical success it seems that Atari is going to expand it in a big way and try to make the most of the brand.
Early this summer I went down to Binghamton, NY where there are two fairly serious retro game shops and it looks to me that there is serious interest in early 1980s game consoles including the Atari 2600, specifically I see a lot of the cartridges for sale as well as old consoles and also new consoles that are compatible with the old 2600. With that context I can see Atari would want to make the most they can out of the brand as challenging as it could be to turn Pong into a single-player game with substantial game play.