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I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise.

Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.

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Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality.

It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.

It's not about visual quality so much as the complete inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was still hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800 launched with... Centipede.

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