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> > Man, I had a 5200 back when I was 12(or 13 I don't remember) and all I remember
> > enjoying was Pac-man which was a fairly good representation of the original. Other
> > games did not interest me that much. The system sold terribly and was dead once the
> > Colecovision came out.
>
> Two main things killed it:
>
> - Terrible joysticks
>
> - Being based on the Atari 400/800 hardware
>
> As regards the former, that was just a truly poor design decision.
>
> For the latter, I suspect that Atari wanted to leverage an existing platform to lower
> development costs and have a decent-sized library of titles out of the gate.
> Unfortunately, compatibility between the 5200 and 8-bit machines was anything but
> direct and there was a porting process (of sorts) required to run 8-bit titles on the
> 5200 and vice-versa. This is further compounded by the fact that the 8-bit computer
> range was already three years old by the time that the 5200 hit the market, and the
> titles that were available at launch weren't anything that hadn't been seen before.
>
> Coleco was also smart in making Donkey Kong the pack-in title for the Colecovision;
> IIRC, Atari re-hashed Super Breakout as its pack-in. By 1982, nobody really cared
> about Breakout or its variants.
>
> That plus a high launch price (I want to say $299.99, but may be wrong) basically
> doomed it. Of course, Atari was to not learn from its mistakes two years later with
> the failed launch of the 7800, which could have saved the console side of the
> business, but didn't.
>
> (Note that I say the above as someone who was an Atari computer user from about 1982
> to around 1995. Loved the hardware; couldn't figure out how that company could have
> its head so far up its arse when it came to selling the damn things.)