Atari was acquired in 1996 and I still see Atari t-shirts regularly. The brand has notoriety with generations that have never used the console. I don't think it's comparable to an active company like Nintendo.

This ignores though that they were practically dead the moment the NES came out.

They were first and that was the secret sauce. That is why people wear those shirts too.

Combat was a mind blowing experience in the moment but that is just proof anything would have been mind blowing in that moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LxPEdUZOkE

I've literally never seen anybody wearing a Nintendo logo tshirt. The Atari logo is iconic. Nintento has IP, Atari has the brand.

I see Nintendo hoodies 5 or 10 times a day here in Boston.

Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a Nintendo branded anything (other than the consoles and games).

Come to think of it, without looking it up now, I have no idea what the Nintendo logo even looks like!

Whereas Atari is ultra-recognizable even so many decades after being dead as a platform. So they must've done brand marketing right.

I had the same exact thought. Nintendo don't even have a 'logo' as such, do they, they use a logotype, the word 'Nintendo' outlined in a rounded rectangle.

Are you European or UK/IE? I notice that despite selling well in Europe the Nintendo product has a lot less 'consumer enthusiasm' there compared to in the US where people are absolutely cuckoo for the stuff.

Huh. Nintendo is a very American thing, I guess.

In the UK, at least, the original NES was marketed/distributed by Mattel as a Mattel product, and they did an incredibly poor job. The Sega Master System was distributed expertly by Virgin Mastertronic who got much better retailer agreements in the UK. As a result, it was far more popular than it ever was in the US.

I think the ubiquity of the NES in the US impacted sales (and therefore software availability) of the Amiga and Atari ST as well.

Sega only began to gain mindshare with the Genesis (the US counterpart to the Mega Drive.) So, Atari has a very old retro cachet, and Nintendo has a solid hold on nostalgia from the late 80s on.

Right. In the US market Atari never mattered again after the VCS/2600. The successor 5200 didn’t do well. Neither did the 7800 which they inexplicably held onto for a few years before release until it was up against the NES.

I can’t speak authoritatively to the micro computers, but I’m under the impression that the Atari line of 8-bits was never very popular in the US. I’ve always gotten the feeling computers played second fiddle to consoles once the NES arrived until the IBM clones started to get good at games much later.

Yeah I had only ever seen one Atari 80bit PC, maybe an 800 and one Coleco Adam. I also saw Atari STs at Toys R Us but only knew two people in the US with one that I met through BBSes.

It was before my time.

I know the Commodore 64 was somewhat popular. There were other computers with games but I don’t think any of them had the capabilities the C-64 did (Apple-II, TRS-80). The ZX was released under the Timex brand but like the Atari I’m not sure it ever went anywhere.

From the history I’ve read I think part of it may be that Atari was just kind of a disaster here. The fact that Atari actually had popularity in Europe plus they could probably make their own decisions without interference from Atari US may have been what allowed them to succeed in Europe. But that’s a guess.

Over here they’re basically synonymous with gaming. They are the company that brought gaming back after the crash with the NES and sold a ton. Then we got the GameBoy which just cemented things further. The Genesis (MegaDrive) was kind of their first real competition here but they released the super Nintendo and it sold a much better (roughly 50m vs 25m).

Of course they’ve been around ever since. The GBA, the DS, the Wii, and the Switch have all been massive successes. they’ve never really disappeared in the US.

They’re kind of the brand for all of gaming history here after the Atari crash. Sega came later (Genesis/MD) and went (so long Dreamcast), Sony came in ‘95 and Microsoft in ‘01. That’s basically it for the big brands.

There’s a reason that tons of people called all video games “Nintendos“ for a very long time.

We bought a Nintendo T-shirt for our child recently, here in Finland.

A picture of the NES controller, with the word "Nintendo" written above it.

Makes me smile, but he has no idea what it is, or what it represents.

Nintendo is Japanese.

I know that. I mean it's something that Americans seem to be enthusiastic about to a much greater extent than Europeans.

I think it's just a design/image thing. Nintendo logo doesn't catch the eye as much. Atari has a strange esoterism, dynamic quality (a bit like Nike) to it.

Well Nintendo also had good branding. But they still exist and still create games.