How Donkey Kong Toppled Atari and Changed Gaming Forever
I explore how Donkey Kong's massive success forced Nintendo to pivot from arcade dominance to home consoles. A contractual dispute over the game's licensing on the Coleco Adam computer caused Atari to walk away from a deal to distribute the Famicom. This single decision allowed Nintendo to launch the NES independently, ultimately dethroning Atari as the industry leader and reshaping the video game market for decades.
Atari could have had the Nintendo NES, and Atari's embattled CEO walked away from the deal over Donkey Kong running on a computer that went on to sell a lousy 100,000 units.
- ndiddy
> Nintendo was about to release a next-generation console, the Famicom, in Japan. They wanted to export it to other markets, but didn’t want to do it alone. Nintendo really wanted to license the Famicom to Atari and have Atari distribute it in North America. Atari CEO Ray Kassar was going to sign the deal at CES in June, but delayed due to the spat over the Coleco Adam version of Donkey Kong. Then the deal fell through the cracks after Atari forced out Kassar as Atari CEO on July 7, 1983. Atari’s next CEO, James Morgan, never revisited it.
There's a leaked memo about this deal available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080327135150/http://www.atarim... . Atari had already paid General Computer to design the 7800 when Nintendo reached out to them about distributing the Famicom. Atari viewed the 7800 hardware as likely being superior to the Famicom, so their strategy was to string out the negotiations for as long as possible until the two systems could be directly compared. The Coleco Adam dispute was probably just a convenient excuse to continue delaying.
When Ray Kassar was forced out due to insider trading (he sold a bunch of Atari stock around half an hour before Atari reported much lower than expected earnings), the business press was generally dismissive of the idea of introducing a new console into an already oversaturated market. The 7800 ended up getting delayed into 1984, then Jack Tramiel bought the company and didn't want to pay General Computer royalties on the […]
- RetroTechie
There's also the dual-screen b/w LCD game (running off 2 LR44 batteries iirc). Back when I was a kid, that was a prized possession during school breaks.
We'd exchange those handhelds with other kids & play 'em to death. Plane & Tank Battle, Highway and Q-Bert spring to mind as some favourites.
- zzzeek
I was a total Atari kid and I still have my 2600 and my 800 on me. If Atari was the one distributing an NES like system IMO they would have just fucked it up. While I loved my atari devices, they were also extremely unreliable mechanically / electronically. The build quality of Nintendo devices (I own about 10 Nintendo devices going back to the SNES that's plugged into my TV with a modern HDMI adapter today) is worlds beyond what Atari was able to pull off in my experience. Granted the Nintendo devices have the advantage of more sophisticated technology but Atari I think really had a cheaper build mentality.
- nyeah
Atari's whole attitude in the early 1980s was "you will buy games that suck."
- tracker1
I remember the January when the gaming market really crashed... the Atari games for 1600/7200 were dirt cheap at Toys R Us... In retrospect, I'd have been happier with Sega at the time... They had more games that I actually liked.