ndiddyan hour ago
> 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 consoles or software so they sat in a warehouse until 1986 when Atari finally paid up.
If Atari did end up going with the Famicom instead of the 7800, I imagine it would have ended up delayed and hamstrung the same way the 7800 was. If anything, maybe this would have left space for the Sega Master System to take over in the US.
bluedinoan hour ago
The other big problem with the 7800 was it was mostly arcade ports. They didn't really do any original games.
People were tired of the 5th home version of Galaga, Pac Man, and Dig Dug (even though the 7800 had decent ports, especially compared to the 2600, which it was also backward-compatible with). Nintendo came out with originals like Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, and then all the third party games...
ndiddyan hour ago
Yeah the 7800 library was basically a bunch of ports of early 80s arcade games that GCC had done for the initial 1984 release date, then ports of whatever computer or arcade games the Tramiels could get cheap licenses for, done by external contractors. Tramiel led Atari wasn't willing to put a bunch of money and effort into pushing video games forward like Nintendo was, they were mainly focusing their internal efforts on the ST computers.
nyeah26 minutes ago
Atari's whole attitude in the early 1980s was "you will buy games that suck."
rk065 hours ago
wow, it is kinda unexpected that both Mario and Donkey Kong started in the same game. and that in first Donkey Kong game, the main mario was the main character.
technothrasher4 hours ago
Hard to be unexpected for the many of us who lived it. It wasn't that long ago. I remember first seeing a ColecoVison, which shipped with Donkey Kong, and being amazed that, unlike on the Atari 2600, the home version of Donkey Kong actually looked very close to the arcade version.
kevin_thibedeau10 minutes ago
There is a modern homebrew 2600 DK which is much better than the original.
pipes3 hours ago
Was he called jump man at that point or am I misremembering this?
ido3 hours ago
He did, as is stated in the article.
rjsw3 hours ago
You could run the original game in Mame.
amiga3863 hours ago
You could stick it in an arcade cabinet and pretend it's the real thing, like Billy Mitchell
https://perfectpacman.com/2022/09/06/new-technical-analysis/
werdnapkan hour ago
I fired up DK in mame after the King of Kong documentary came out and ended up playing quite a lot as I recalled as a kid having a very difficult time getting anywhere in the game. It was fairly satisfying getting through all the main stages for the first time.
chocochunks2 hours ago
It's also been re-released on Nintendo Switch as a part of Arcade Archives.
rusk4 hours ago
It’s not a big secret. I’m pretty sure it was mentioned in Chris Pratt’s recent adaptation…
rk063 hours ago
it is not a secret but very unexpected. when I heard of donkey kong, it was in context of donkey kong franchise which obviously feature Donkey Kong as main character just like mario is main character of mario games.
so technically first Donkey Kong game in Donkey Kong series is actually a Mario game. i understand why and how it happened. but this is a trivia that you either know or you would not believe from untrusted sources
dec0dedab0de11 minutes ago
Donkey Kong is the main character. Mario was just who the player controlled, he was so unimportant he didn't have a name and they just called him Jump Man.
hnlmorg3 hours ago
It’s more the other way around: the first Mario game was a Donkey Kong game.
The user avatar is only “Mario” in appearance. He was called “Jump Man” in that game and even his outfit colours differed from the Mario games that followed.
zzzeek23 minutes ago
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.
ButlerianJihad5 hours ago
I thought that HN didn’t permit “How…” article titles?
manarth5 hours ago
There's a link to the submission guidelines in the HN footer
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In general, the original title is preferred, and "How…" is acceptable.