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7/29/2025, 7:57:56 PM
>>11904318
I lived through the crash, albeit as a very young guy, and I remember shovelware being kind of an issue but not a huge one. If you were buying games randomly just because you liked the cover art then your chances of getting a turd were higher than you would want them to be. But the vast majority of the big titles were still arcade ports and in theory if you bought frogger or breakout you knew what to expect. And licensed games like Superman or Raiders of the Lost Ark weren't always great but typically the really shady companies couldn't afford the licenses so they were unlikely to just be pure crap.
If you bought known properties and stuff that had good word of mouth it was usually a fairly safe bet. And that's where Atari really screwed up with the 1-2 punch of Pac-Man and E.T. Pac-Man sold like crazy because it was one of those games you could presume was a safe bet. It was fucking Pac-Man. The hottest arcade game at the time. The home port was a no-brainer. Except it wasn't very good. Similarly, E.T., being a huge license and a scalding hot commodity, *should* have got the AAA treatment and been a game you bought with confidence that it was mediocre at worst and instead they handed it off to one guy and gave him five minutes to make it and it turned out...weird.
Neither game was broken or buggy or unplayable but they were so obviously low effort. And these were games that were supposed to be no-brainer purchases. And that's when people started to check out. Shovelware could be ignored as background noise but once legit brand name titles were being shat out with minimal quality control it eroded the trust in everything. If they couldn't even bother to get Pac-Man right then what *would* they get right?
Late-stage Atari thought consumers were just mindless sheep who would buy anything with a recognizable name as long as it was technically functional. They needed a reality check and they got one
I lived through the crash, albeit as a very young guy, and I remember shovelware being kind of an issue but not a huge one. If you were buying games randomly just because you liked the cover art then your chances of getting a turd were higher than you would want them to be. But the vast majority of the big titles were still arcade ports and in theory if you bought frogger or breakout you knew what to expect. And licensed games like Superman or Raiders of the Lost Ark weren't always great but typically the really shady companies couldn't afford the licenses so they were unlikely to just be pure crap.
If you bought known properties and stuff that had good word of mouth it was usually a fairly safe bet. And that's where Atari really screwed up with the 1-2 punch of Pac-Man and E.T. Pac-Man sold like crazy because it was one of those games you could presume was a safe bet. It was fucking Pac-Man. The hottest arcade game at the time. The home port was a no-brainer. Except it wasn't very good. Similarly, E.T., being a huge license and a scalding hot commodity, *should* have got the AAA treatment and been a game you bought with confidence that it was mediocre at worst and instead they handed it off to one guy and gave him five minutes to make it and it turned out...weird.
Neither game was broken or buggy or unplayable but they were so obviously low effort. And these were games that were supposed to be no-brainer purchases. And that's when people started to check out. Shovelware could be ignored as background noise but once legit brand name titles were being shat out with minimal quality control it eroded the trust in everything. If they couldn't even bother to get Pac-Man right then what *would* they get right?
Late-stage Atari thought consumers were just mindless sheep who would buy anything with a recognizable name as long as it was technically functional. They needed a reality check and they got one
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