Atari 7800 Prosystem

Atari 7800 Prosystem

The story of the 7800 Prosystem, released in 1986, is perhaps the saddest in the entire saga that is Atari. It could have been an amazing system; the technology was in fact greater than that of its competitor, NES (released earlier that year), yet the 7800 was originally meant to be released two years earlier, before the NES was even a whisper. This would have saved their company and put them on the forefront of console gaming yet again, but it didn't happen this way...

Atari was aware of the many pitfalls that their prior console, the 5200 Supersystem, faced, and the 7800 was their answer to this massive problem. Unlike the 5200, the 7800 would be backwards compatible with the massive library of VCS/2600 games, include better analog controllers, and several other tweaks. It was set to be released in 1984, hundreds of thousands of units were packaged and waiting on warehouse shelves for the release date. But then came the video game crash, and Atari decided they would be better off postponing - or canceling altogether - the release of their newest and "greatest" system. Big mistake...

In Japan, Nintendo's Famicom console system was a big success upon it's release in 1984. After a few years of noticing the almost nonexistant gaming market in the US (due to the crash), they decided to release the Famicom tentatively in New York, to see if the public would bite. For the US release, they named their system after the company, and released to amazing successes. It was shortly thereafter that Atari noticed the NES' success, and quickly released the dust-gathering 7800. But it was too late. Atari failed to jump at the opportunity to be the ONLY gaming system available, and the 7800 suffered drastically. Instead, Nintendo took over the American market. The 7800 Prosystem was an almost immediate failure, as Nintendo's aggressive marketing and licensing agreements with the top third party developers prohibited them to make games for consoles other than those created by Nintendo. The 7800 went under quickly, and remains a rather collectible item today.