A Brilliant Failure: The Atari 400 & 800 Story

Little Car October 3, 2025
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Little Car

@littlecar

About

This is a secondary channel to my main channel - Big Car (https://www.youtube.com/bigcar2) that focuses on car videos. This channel has videos on other topics that interest me, but also companion videos to the Big Car channel. I hope you find it interesting! If you need to contact me, e-mail is probably best as I don't check social media very often, but I don't do paid promotions or endorsements, so please don't ask.

Video Description

When the Atari 400 & 800 launched they managed to land without much interest, and failed to get traction, especially in their native US market. Why weren’t they success, what bad luck and unforced errors got them to that point, and why were they such a great design? If you'd like to support what I do please consider supporting me below: PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/bigcartv Big Car merch: https://teespring.com/stores/bigcartv Link to my other channel - Big Car: https://https://www.youtube.com/bigcar2 Sources: https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-32-al-alcorn-atari-employee-3 https://www.atariarchives.org/dev/CGEXPO99.ppt https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978 https://archive.org/details/atari-800-series-computers-40-years/PRGE+2019+session+320.mp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R9LwFeftxQ https://archive.org/details/vcf19eastr6/page/n9/mode/2up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTIA_and_GTIA https://archive.ph/20121208194608/http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/400800/ATARI800/A800.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CES_(trade_show) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_BASIC http://historyofpersonalcomputing.com/wordpress/atari-400-and-800/ https://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/wci_games.html https://archive.org/details/19781128AtariEntersPersonalHomeComputerIndustry https://archive.org/details/Inside_Atari_DOS https://archive.org/details/vcf19eastr6 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/atari-the-golden-years----a-history-1978-1981 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers #littlecar

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