HAL Laboratory's Three Arcade Ports
nicole.express
nicole.express
It was a weird point in video games - my parents of course go into the video game/arcade fad, and now the same games were on the home consoles. So we liked the same games and we could actually compete a little bit.
The NES gave us things like Super Mario Brothers which was a totally new thing. Nobody wanted to play arcade ports anymore, but Atari kept pushing. I'm sure it was internal politics at play. My parents didn't like the NES controller and they were getting older so they never played anything on the NES except Tetris and the like.
Eventually the arcade ports made their way to the NES, and they were really, really good. Ms Pac-man was a little weird because of the level size and sprite size, but Galaga and Donkey Kong were perfect. But by this point we had Zelda and Tecmo Bowl and everything else, we didn't have to live in the past anymore.
The Famicom had a similarly arcade port heavy library in it's early days but over time games got more sophisticated especially as new mapper chips became available allowing for new features like vertical and horizontal scrolling. With the NES being released several years later we got to skip a lot of the more basic titles while still getting some of the older good ones like Donkey Kong.
They still had all those mediocre (as in long in the tooth) arcade games but also original games (full RPG and complex strategy) more like computer ports.
The dark horse contenders were the actual "general purpose" computers. That worked out well but took quite a bit longer to play out than the consoles in gaming popularity. Less accessible I suppose.
What really killed the 7800 I think is that it was cancelled and only later released after the NES revived the market. And it was released at a budget price point with a bunch of mediocre arcade ports. And this was after Super Mario Bros. had rocked the world! And the NES had better ports of most of the 7800 launch lineup!
I wonder what would have happened if the 7800 had not been cancelled originally. I think the NES would have still beaten it in sales, but maybe the NES would have looked primitive in '85 if 7800 devs had a year of learning how to get more out of the hardware.
I do think that had it not had a terrible launch, used better controllers, and invested more in software dev and on-cart tech(there were scrapped plans for better audio chips) it could have gotten a serious market share.
But the whole story of Atari is that it succeeded marvelously as a startup and then subsequently floundered as a large enterprise, and this is just one more example.