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September 26, 2005
Worst decision ever
Back in 1983 Nintendo wanted to break to the American market selling their Famicom console which had a good run in Japan. At that time they weren't confident that they can compete against the American giant Atari, then the console leader with their 2600, 5200 and soon to be released 7800. So instead of competing head to head they approached Atari to license their name for the Famicom console. Atari told Nintendo that they weren't interested in their game system and the marketing hated the Nintendo controller because it doesn't have the joystick in it. At that time all Atari's controllers had the little joystick in it, while Famicom controller which derived from Nintendo's Game & Watch has the D-Pad. EGM said that this was also because an unrelated spat over an unauthorised home port of Donkey Kong. This was to be the worst flop ever in the video game industry, even bigger than Nintendo's mistake to abandon Sony's partnership.
Nintendo decided to go ahead selling Famicom in US re-branding it as "Nintendo Entertainment System" (NES) and the rest is history. It came and swept the US market and in its course sent Atari packing from the industry. Atari was eventually sold to Hasbro on 1998 for a measly USD5 million.
Granted Atari's demise was not caused by a single bad decision (one of the execs was reported to say "I could put [anything] in a box and it'd sell a million copies,"), but one could see that had Atari let Nintendo license its name, the income from what had been NES would have delivered millions into its bank account and probably saved the company.
[From EGM & other sources]
Posted by vhadiant at September 26, 2005 09:59 AM
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