Atari 7800

The Atari 7800 or also known as the Atari 7800 ProSystem is a console that was released by Atari back in January 1986.

It is often seen that the release in 1986 is considered a re-release because it had originally been announced on 21, May 1984 to replace the aging Atari 5200 but was shelved due to the sale of the company producing it (GCC).

Due to this delay it gave the NES time to build up and was dominating the market by the time 7800 was released into the market making it a very hard sell.

There were 13 games announced for the consoles launch this included some hits such as Centipede, Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-man. Also due to the strong feedback Atari received regarding not being able to play previous games on the 5200 they made sure this console was able to play almost all the games from the 2600.

Also as growing concerns from the community that a home PC was a better investment than a console the system was designed to be fully fledged home computer. You were able to plug in a keyboard and other peripherals such as disk drives and printers.

The console even though didn’t do nearly as well as the NES, but was still profitable for Atari, with it managing to sell over 3.8 million units worldwide. On January 1st 1992 Atari announced that the production of the Atari 7800 will end only being able to capture 12% while its rival Nintendo controlled 80%.