![]() It's what Pac Man should have been in the first place. Well as bad as that one was, "Pac Man Arcade" is a perfect example of somebody "making something right". ![]() The shoddy "Pac Man" on the 2600 is often cited as the catylist for the video game crash. Said kernel would have occupied too much of the addressable 4k.so it was scratched and redesigned to use primitive flicker when the bankswitching request fell though. The only thing that is certian (confirmed by other programmers) is that Frye was in the middle of designing a multisprite flicker kernel for the title when this suggestion was refused. I dunno if this was the case at all, tho.still trying to figure out the programming timetable that games were written in. Asteroids), there wouldn't be time to allocate to begin creating Pac-Man there. If this workstation was occupied putting the finishing touches on their first banked game (i.e. Supposedly, Atari only had one bankswitching workstation at the time (summer to winter '81). The other distinct possibility was resources. Management had a pretty strong case against it, due to the cost of the Midway license to produce the game (and because the game only featured 5 moving sprites in an unchanging maze.Maze Craze had no problem even with random mazes). It was cheaper to produce a 4k run than 8k (and this falls in line with management's treatment of programmers at the time.which was "do it or we'll just get somebody else"). Frye pitched it to them, and they flat out refused to allow the program to be above 4k.ĪFAIK.the main excuse was cost. Both games use methods that were virtually unknown at the time.in addition to using illegal opcodes (which was not acceptable back in the "would"."was". ![]() Neither one of those could have been programmed back in 1981 tho (as mentioned above). No game could "save" the console market of '82.they didn't use business practices that lent itself to be saved. In the meantime, investors continue to abandon most support (and ALL new interest) in the entire market and leave it to rot. 3rd-parties that also played by those unstable rules also dried up. ones that already had established.and computer user bases) are able to survive the shakeout. ![]() No first-party OEMs but the biggest players (i.e. What stores couldn't drop the price on quick enough was ultimately returned for minimal credit or scrapped. So the OEM's were stuck with unsold finished goods cluttering up vast warehouses. Per retailer agreements with the OEM's, some were fortunate enough to get back at least a minimal share of what they put in.by returning or outright cancelling their preorders. That's unsold games, not "an unsold title". Stores had preordered HUGE lots to gear up for what was anticipated to be another record year (prompting OEMs to produce them) were stuck with no prospects to sell those games to. Cheaper home computers being one of them). The console market was fractured beyond repair to support it's dwindling slice of consumer dollars (who were already putting more interest.and more importantly their dollars.into other markets. So profits go from fair to worse (especially considering reckless R&D spending that most of them were guilty of). So what ultimately DID happen was that too many producers stuck their fingers in the pie to try to grab a share. Much bigger problems were the market saturation, waning consumer interest, squandered profits both inside and outside of the corporations, and the lack of a stable/reliable business model (everything up to that point was based on the fickle whims of the public.no safeguard in place at all). Atari's Pac-Man was their biggest seller, and that wasn't enough to alter the coarse of the crash-diving console market. There's more factors at play here whether or not a game is "good" (and that aspect had minimal effect in the big picture anyway). ![]() No, because by the time that the game was released, the home console market was already headed to a serious downswing. ![]()
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